he article, Fils de Dieu
(vol. vi.), without sliding into Arian, Nestorian, Socinian, or other
heretical view on that fantastic theme. We need not linger over the
names of other writers, who indeed are now little more than mere shadows
of names, such as La Condamine, a scientific traveller of fame and merit
in his day and generation; of Du Marsais, the poverty-stricken and
unlucky scholar who wrote articles on grammar; of the President Des
Brosses, who was unfortunate enough to be in the right in a quarrel
about money with Voltaire, and who has since been better known to
readers through the fury of the provoked patriarch, than through his own
meritorious contributions to the early history of civilisation.

The name of one faithful worker in the building of this new Jerusalem
ought not to be omitted, though his writings were _multa non multum_.
The Chevalier de Jaucourt (1704-1779), as his title shows, was the
younger son of a noble house. He studied at Geneva, Cambridge, and
Leyden, and published in 1734 a useful account of the life and writings
of Leibnitz. When the Encyclopaedia was projected, his services were at
once secured, and he became its slave from the beginning of A to the end
of Z. He wrote articles in his own special subjects of natural history
and physical science, but he was always ready to lend his help in other
departments, in writing, rewriting, reading, correcting, and all those
other humbler necessities of editorship of which the inconsiderate
reader knows little and thinks less. Jaucourt revelled in this drudgery.
God made him for grinding articles, said Diderot. For six or seven
years, he wrote one day, Jaucourt has been in the middle of half a dozen
secretaries, reading, dictating, slaving, for thirteen or fourteen hours
a day, and he is not tired of it even now. When he was told that the
work must positively be brought to an end, his countenance fell, and the
prospect of release from such happy bondage filled his heart with
desolation.[115] "If," says Diderot in the preface to the eighth volume
(1765), "we have raised a shout of joy like the sailor when he espies
land after a sombre night that has kept him midway between sky and
flood, it is to M. de Jaucourt that we are indebted for it. What has he
not done for us, especially in these latter times? With what constancy
has he not refused all the solicitations, whether of friendship or of
authority, that sought to take him away from us? Never has s